CHAPTER XII.

SIGNALS AND CODES.

(Extracts from Signal Book, United States Army, 1916.)

General Instructions for Army Signaling.

1.  Each signal station will have its call, consisting of one or two letters, as Washington, “W”; and each operator or signalist will also have his personal signal of one or two letters, as Jones, “Jo.”  These being once adopted will not be changed without due authority.

2.  To lessen liability of error, numerals which occur in the body of a message should be spelled out.

3.  In receiving a message the man at the telescope should call out each letter as received, and not wait for the completion of a word.

4.  A record of the date and time of the receipt or transmission of every message must be kept.

5.  The duplicate manuscript of messages received at, or the original sent from, a station should be carefully filed.

6.  In receiving messages nothing should be taken for granted, and nothing considered as seen until it has been positively and clearly in view.  Do not anticipate what will follow from signals already given.  Watch the communicating station until the last signals are made, and be very certain that the signal for the end of the message has been given.

7.  Every address must contain at least two words and should be sufficient to secure delivery.

8.  All that the sender writes for transmission after the word “To” is counted.

9.  Whenever more than one signature is attached to a message count all initials and names as a part of the message.

10.  Dictionary words, initial letters, surnames of persons, names of cities, towns, villages, States, and Territories, or names of the Canadian Provinces will be counted each as one word:  e.g._, New York, District of Columbia, East St. Louis should each be counted as one word.  The abbreviation of the names of cities, towns, villages, States, Territories, and provinces will be counted the same as if written in full.

11.  Abbreviations of weights and measures in common use, figures, decimal points, bars of division, and in ordinal numbers the affixes “st,” “d,” “nd,” “rd,” and “th” will be each counted as one word.  Letters and groups of letters, when such groups do not form dictionary words and are not combinations of dictionary words, will be counted at the rate of five letters or fraction of five letters to a word.  When such groups are made up of combinations of dictionary words, each dictionary word so used will be counted.

12.  The following are exceptions to paragraph 55, and are counted as shown: 

  A. M. 1 word
  P. M. 1 word
  O. K. 1 word
  Per cent 1 word

13.  No message will be considered sent until its receipt has been acknowledged by the receiving station.

The International Morse or General Service Code.